Harvey Mudd is one of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, along with Pomona, Claremont McKenna, Scripps, and Pitzer. Harvey Mudd specializes in science and engineering for undergrads. Alumni often claim that it’s a better undergrad school than nearby Caltech, which is extremely grad oriented. From Wikipedia:

Harvey Mudd today still maintains the highest rate of science and engineering Ph.D. production among all undergraduate colleges and second highest (Caltech ranks first and MIT third) compared to all universities and colleges, according to a 2008 report by the National Science Foundation.

At Harvey Mudd more than half of computer science graduates are women.

Rosanna Xia

… Nationwide, according to the Computing Research Assn., more than 84% of undergraduates who major in computer science are men.

Not so at Harvey Mudd, where more than half — 55% — of the latest class of computer science graduates were women, compared to roughly 10% a decade ago. …

To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. They urged students to save their more advanced conversations for time with their teachers outside of class.

… Today, more than 40% of the school’s computer science faculty is female. Students also are offered a paid trip to the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, billed as the largest professional gathering of women in technology.

It helps that Maria Klawe, Harvey Mudd’s president since 2006, is a computer scientist herself. Her influence in making the field more attractive to women has been recognized by the White House’s chief technology officer. She has called out tech executives for not encouraging women. …

“Building confidence and a sense of belonging and a sense of community among these women makes such a huge difference,” she said. “Once you change the myths and the cultural beliefs about computer science, that has a lot of momentum.”

… Monday and Tuesday this week, the California college will not hold classes, the cancellation following a student sit-in last week at the campus, where minority students issued demands to administration — among them to funnel more money into counseling services, specifically geared toward students of color, and to prioritize minority student groups with funding and other perks.

Students didn’t ask for a cancellation, but rather the college did so to allow students and faculty members time either to consider some of the persisting issues on campus or to recuperate after a tense few weeks, Maria Klawe, the college’s president, said in a phone interview.

The move is highly unusual. Even as many campuses face tensions on race and other issues, it is rare to shut down for even a day as a result.

The full fare for a year at Harvey Mudd is $64,427, so canceling two school days is about equivalent per student to setting fire to $1,000 in mom and dad’s money.

The elite science and engineering-centric institution has suffered a string of misfortunes with the deaths of three students since last July, prompting fresh grief among the campus community every time, Klawe said. The latest, a beloved campus leader with a sunny disposition, was found dead in his room from undetermined causes. The other two students died in separate car accidents. Harvey Mudd enrolls about 800 students, and such deaths affect the tight-knit community deeply, Klawe said. …

Some faculty members, meanwhile, told the interviewers that students were not prepared for their classes, and that they’d observed deterioration in the quality of students accepted to Harvey Mudd over the years. They described students as wed to their phones and not committed to the sciences. …

Faculty viewed the report, but it was withheld from the students to avoid the hurt feelings that would come from the faculty’s comments — all were anonymous, Klawe said.

Still, someone provided it to the student newspaper, and a story on the so-called Wabash report was published two weeks ago, the same day that a memorial service for one of the students was being held on campus.

Students read the story, and later some of them printed out jumbo-size versions of the more stinging remarks from professors included in the report and plastered them to the president’s house and faculty members’ offices.

Later that week, students organized a march around campus and presented administrators with their demands. They want five new counselors for the coming academic year, with three of them being people of color, “to reflect the increasing need of health and wellness initiatives at Mudd to reflect and serve its diversifying student body,” the students wrote on a website detailing their requests. …

Students who staged the sit-in did not respond to interview requests. FEMUnion at Harvey Mudd, a student group that advocates for women in science, technology, mathematics and engineering fields, wrote in a Facebook message to Inside Higher Ed that the student organizers “were tired” and did not wish to be interviewed.

… Klawe described the significant shifts that have occurred on campus in the past decade — white men have historically dominated at the college — until it attempted to diversify the campus, a campaign that has seen relative success.

While leadership there has recruited more women — to the point where they comprise nearly 50 percent of the student body — gains in the numbers of Hispanic and black students were sluggish until recent years, Klawe said. As a college recognized for its sciences, Harvey Mudd competes with institutions like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both with higher profiles.

With this diversity comes growing pains

Like hurt feelings, lots and lots of hurt feelings.

and practices that benefited what was the traditional Harvey Mudd student still linger, but are being identified.

Students pointed out a couple years ago that all lecturers in a campus speaker series were white men, Klawe said. …

Like with many institutions nationwide, the results of the presidential election upset the campus population, according to Klawe, and so, in a largely positive step, conversations on campus have become more “radicalized” and have centered more than ever on social justice reforms.

Some faculty spent Monday afternoon in a training learning more about sensitivity toward minority groups and women.

That raises a question that ought to be of interest to investors: Does the increasing campus hysteria and antirationality portend bad news for Silicon Valley? If students increasingly grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules, will they be able to code emotionless computers as well as in the past?

Once again most minorities have proved they have no business in science and engineering courses. Doubly so at a college like Harvey Mud where only the truly serious and talented should attend.

I suspect these female and minority whiners were accepted even though they don’t have the prerequisites for even attending the college and were allowed in because of sex and ethnicity. If they did they wouldn’t be whining.

It’s the college’s fault for not maintaining standards. The hell with them because they’re gonna destroy their rep in no time by tolerating these ethnic and female dimwits.

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Colleges definitely need to spend more money on counselling. Just look how great counselling is for lowering divorce rates and turning around homeless military vets and drug addicts. Most of them are cured in just a few sessions. If we could only spend more money on the miracle cure that is person-centred counselling then utopia would be just around the corner.

Miracle cures.... We once took our adopted daughter in for counseling and therapy. It appeared to go nowhere over a multi-month period. I asked the psychologist about the "game plan" ... "How is this therapy suppose to work?" His answer:

"The objective is for me to develop a close relationship with (your daughter). Then, she will be more willing to open up and share her innermost feelings. When in the open, we can work on them ...." Then, I asked. "How long does this take?" His reply, "Years!"

Let's see, we met for 50 minutes a week. At least ten of these were spent on administration. So, the psychologist was going to develop a close relationship with our daughter ... a professional relationship I presume ... 40 minutes a week that would include her intimating to him her innermost thoughts, feelings, and fears. Is it possible to develop a close and trusting relationship like this with a stranger you meet and talk to for slightly more than 30 minutes a week?

The obsession with counselors is make work. The need for grief counselors at a school of 800 students when a couple of students die is bizarre. I went to a high school that was slightly more than half the size of Mudd. In my class alone we lost one student each year due to some accident. If you needed to talk to someone you went to your pastor, family, or friends. You didn't go to some stranger who is basically going off of a script.

Have you noticed that whenever some recovering drug addict or other social hard-case is interviewed, they always indicate that - after they turn their life around - they want to become a counselor. I guess it's good to have drug counselors who used to be addicts - they might be able to hook you up with some drugs.

There was a not so good movie a bit back called Get Him to the Greek, in which a pop-singer goes all We Are the World and culturally appropriates African music. His drummer is an American black who describes the performance visage he puts on as "Africa Face." Africa Face consists of a broad, unchanging smile, like you might find on the face of an ecstatic simpleton. That's what I picture when I hear "sunny disposition."

I suppose as he descended toward his grave, there was a Black Hole Sun effect on the man with the sunny disposition's smile. Slowly it expanded until he becomes a ln inhuman ghoul.

Maybe my imagination is running away with itself. But all the article told me is he was sunny and now he's dead. What about the color of his shirt or his favorite tv show? Huh?

If I understand the mainstream media stylebook correctly, this type of description would only be used for a person of color.

Was he a good boy, clean and articulate?

There was a not so good movie a bit back called Get Him to the Greek, in which a pop-singer goes all We Are the World and culturally appropriates African music. His drummer is an American black who describes the performance visage he puts on as “Africa Face.” Africa Face consists of a broad, unchanging smile, like you might find on the face of an ecstatic simpleton. That’s what I picture when I hear “sunny disposition.”

I suppose as he descended toward his grave, there was a Black Hole Sun effect on the man with the sunny disposition’s smile. Slowly it expanded until he becomes a ln inhuman ghoul.

Maybe my imagination is running away with itself. But all the article told me is he was sunny and now he’s dead. What about the color of his shirt or his favorite tv show? Huh?

Colleges definitely need to spend more money on counselling. Just look how great counselling is for lowering divorce rates and turning around homeless military vets and drug addicts. Most of them are cured in just a few sessions. If we could only spend more money on the miracle cure that is person-centred counselling then utopia would be just around the corner.

I went to therapy once. It was exactly like talking to a guidance councillor. Which is to say worthless.

They gave me a long, repetitive test to determine whether I was nutso. (I passed.) Maybe that was worth something.

Poor kids, they don’t have the ability to keep up with the intense work load of a serious school like Harvey Mudd. If they had wanted the college experience and the degree, they could have attended a less demanding uni. What they really wanted was the prestige of attending a good school. Sad!

“…professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. …”

We all know how “Shut a Fuck,Donny!”
treatment of timid Betas had a weird ,
but uber-beneficial impact on our society.

Not even Almighty Bitchvanka aint got sh*t on these basement warring, anti-snowflake milenials.

They will continue to intimidate by answering all questions.

They own the IT Universe , while the wimmin continue to play in a virtual Mudd.

This is sad. I went to Harvey Mudd in the 90′s and it was always the one place at the Claremont Colleges that didn’t go for these sorts of shenanigans. I would hope the strikers are just a vocal minority.

To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions.

When boys are falling behind, it’s because toxic masculinity discourages doing homework and participating in class. And we should celebrate the Girl Power triumph of the stupid lazy boys being intimidated and outsmarted at every turn by the sassy girls in the class.

When girls are falling behind male nerds, it’s because toxic masculinity encourages those nerds to do their homework and participate in class. When a boy puts up his hand and asks “um, shouldn’t that be i-1 instead of i?”, this isn’t nerd pedantry, it’s a display of macho braggadocio that turns out to be Kryptonite to any Girl Power in the class.

So in order to preserve Girl Power, they invent rules like “no well, actually’s”, where nerds are reeducated to pretend like normal boys that they haven’t done their homework. This curb on pedantry only applies to males on the subject of programming, the female students being encouraged to constructively criticize any unconscious bias they detect among their male classmates.

“more than half — 55% — of the latest class of computer science graduates were women, compared to roughly 10% a decade ago”

As Steve has often pointed out, twenty years back IT was a good and remunerative field for bright women. In my experience they had a slight bias towards analysis (esp business analysis) which was often better paid work than programming.

In the outsourced, H1B world they may find things a little different (in the UK, Indian doctors have above-average rates of sexual harassment of nurses and patients, but I have no data or anecdote on Indian IT managers).

This was inevitable and a window into future STEM classes through the country. First you have to lower admission standards to get in the right demographic. Then you have to lower academic standards. I imagine to get enough (non-Asian) women, blacks and Hispanics (along with the “theys” of the world) into the field, programming will have to switch from being a rigorous goal based discipline to being a subjection one that stresses personal expression, sort of like dance therapy.

The final step will be forcing companies to hire, retain and promote this new breed of programmer.

I sure see a lot of young white women marrying latinos and other non-Whites, although usually not black men.

Sure seems like a lot more of it among the “lower classes”, at least in Texas and California. I also get the impression a lot of it is happening in some of these evangelical non-denominational churches.

As if Latino guys are joining these church groups in order to scoop up naive white girls.

Any parent knows that giving in to the demands and tantrums of a small child will get you an unpleasant and hard to control kid in short order that will think nothing of blowing up in any setting to get their way. Obviously large swathes of society have been given the green light to act this way as near-adults and then carry this into college, careers, and our culture at large.

We need a sea change in our culture at the earliest levels if we want to have a prayer of a cohesive and successful society a generation from now.

Arc, My daughter is a psychologist who will tell you that most of her problem kids are the result of poor parenting, the rest have diagnosable disorders. The parents create a problem and then hand it off to someone else to fix. On the other hand, letting unprepared and unqualified students into a challenging academic college is doomed from the start.

Richard Spencer could teach us something about why women aren’t going into computer science and other STEM fields.

Richard Spencer is clearly very intelligent — watch him give an extemporaneous talk to know what I mean — but I don’t think he considers himself to be good at maths. How could that be? Surely someone whose brain ticks along as quickly as his does could easily become competent if not great at maths? He’s what we call a ‘humanities type’. Very smart verbally, but not so smart mathematically.

The reason he’s bad at maths has nothing to do with his cognitive ability. The reason is simply that he’s not interested in maths. That’s how someone as smart as he is can be so bad at maths. Similarly, women aren’t interested in maths and other STEM fields. That’s why they’re so bad at them.

Richard Spencer could teach us something about why women aren’t going into computer science and other STEM fields.

Richard Spencer is clearly very intelligent — watch him give an extemporaneous talk to know what I mean — but I don’t think he considers himself to be good at maths. How could that be? Surely someone whose brain ticks along as quickly as his does could easily become competent if not great at maths? He’s what we call a ‘humanities type’. Very smart verbally, but not so smart mathematically.

Because in STEM disposition is almost more important than intelligence. That's why East Asians, including East Asian females, excel. They have the perfect disposition for this kind of work. STEM work is largely boring. The days of Robert Goddard and Alfred Lee Loomis are gone. Nowadays you are a cog in a wheel and are working on some small part of a defense-related system. IT work is pretty much glorified clerical work. And Silicon Valley is the new Madison Avenue without the glitz and glamour and interesting people.

Colleges definitely need to spend more money on counselling. Just look how great counselling is for lowering divorce rates and turning around homeless military vets and drug addicts. Most of them are cured in just a few sessions. If we could only spend more money on the miracle cure that is person-centred counselling then utopia would be just around the corner.

Miracle cures…. We once took our adopted daughter in for counseling and therapy. It appeared to go nowhere over a multi-month period. I asked the psychologist about the “game plan” … “How is this therapy suppose to work?” His answer:

“The objective is for me to develop a close relationship with (your daughter). Then, she will be more willing to open up and share her innermost feelings. When in the open, we can work on them ….” Then, I asked. “How long does this take?” His reply, “Years!”

Let’s see, we met for 50 minutes a week. At least ten of these were spent on administration. So, the psychologist was going to develop a close relationship with our daughter … a professional relationship I presume … 40 minutes a week that would include her intimating to him her innermost thoughts, feelings, and fears. Is it possible to develop a close and trusting relationship like this with a stranger you meet and talk to for slightly more than 30 minutes a week?

Jester, man goes to a therapist. Complains that he can't sleep because he knows there are monsters under his bed. Therapist schedules a series of sessions, two a week at $2oo per session and estimates it will take at least a year to get at the root of the problem and then eliminate this fear. Man never returns to the therapist, but he bumps into the therapist at the grocery store. Therapist inquires on why the patient never followed through on the therapy. Man says his brother-in-law told him he could cure him for $50. Therapist scoffs, how could that be? Brother-in-law is a carpenter, sawed the legs off my bed for $50.

Colleges definitely need to spend more money on counselling. Just look how great counselling is for lowering divorce rates and turning around homeless military vets and drug addicts. Most of them are cured in just a few sessions. If we could only spend more money on the miracle cure that is person-centred counselling then utopia would be just around the corner.

The obsession with counselors is make work. The need for grief counselors at a school of 800 students when a couple of students die is bizarre. I went to a high school that was slightly more than half the size of Mudd. In my class alone we lost one student each year due to some accident. If you needed to talk to someone you went to your pastor, family, or friends. You didn’t go to some stranger who is basically going off of a script.

To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students

When I was in school, working toward a computer science degree, not only were half the students women, most of the guys were shy nerds. There are not too many macho types in the computer science world. How much of a wallflower does a women have to be to not be able to compete with the guys that I went to school with?

If students increasingly grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules, will they be able to code emotionless computers as well as in the past?

I have said it here before, computer programming is a tedious and extremely boring occupation suited to only people with a passion for puzzles. It is for people who would not get bored playing with a Rubik’s Cube day after day for years on end.

It is not tedious, unless you are doing business programming. I've frequently been so excited by a program I was developing that I stayed awake until the sun rose. One frequently solves a problem where the answer cannot be looked up in a library or solved within an existing software application.

I have twice as an amateur faced a professional middleweight in the ring. I have driven across the Namibian desert alone, looking for adventure, and I've surfed Southern California and the Indian Ocean. But yes, I could barely put Rubik's Cube down until I had solved it without outside help. It took about 50 hours.

"...professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. ..."

We all know how "Shut a Fuck,Donny!"
treatment of timid Betas had a weird ,
but uber-beneficial impact on our society.

Not even Almighty Bitchvanka aint got sh*t on these basement warring, anti-snowflake milenials.

They will continue to intimidate by answering all questions.

They own the IT Universe , while the wimmin continue to play in a virtual Mudd.

Praise the Algorithm.

If the students are sitting in the same class of the same program in the same university, I don’t understand how some students are ‘more experienced’.

If the entry criteria is the same for all, most students should be at a similar level. If some are accepted with lower standards, that may be part of the problem.

I don’t blame these women at all. They should be protesting! If you knew anything about Harvey Mudd you would know he was the brother of Harry Mudd (formal name–Harcourt Fenton Mudd).

For those who are unfamiliar with Harry Mudd…he was a noted misogynist. Really, just a scoundrel.

Harry Mudd was engaged in the illegal sex trade, He would use plain-looking women who didn’t have body-positive self images, and he would ply them with an illegal drug called the Venus Drug. The Venus Drug had the effect of making these these poor women appear absolutely irresistible. These women would remain ‘beautiful’ so long as they took the drug.

The M.O. behind Harry Mudd’s scheme was to lure unsuspecting men into marriage. Then, these beautifult-but-significantly-overweight women would stop taking the Venus Drug and it would be revealed that they were carrying a “few extra pounds” along with some other warts. Of course the shallow, pig-husbands would want to dump them since they weren’t so pretty after all. Harry Mudd would then step in and extract a ransom to nullify the marriage.

This was blatant misogyny! Harry Mudd was a misogynist and I have no doubt his brother, Harvey Mudd was a misogynist too! Harvey Mudd represents the disgusting practice of sexual slavery and these brave, body-positive women should demand that school officials change the name immediately. #IStandAgainstMudd.

Thought pieces on Mudd gals frequently invoke Ada Lovelace as the inventor of computer programming, when she was actually more of the first coding evangelist (an actual modern day job description for diversity-track technocrats). Ada was an interesting woman who did not ask to be a feminist icon.

To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. They urged students to save their more advanced conversations for time with their teachers outside of class.

… Today, more than 40% of the school’s computer science faculty is female. Students also are offered a paid trip to the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, billed as the largest professional gathering of women in technology.

I bet when it all started, and even today, feminists promised that changing the sex balance at universities wouldn’t change the character or quality of learning.

Sort of like how the great victory of Husseincare would let you keep your doctor, if you like your doctor.

Or how the great victory of the 1965 immigration act would never alter the demographic balance of the US.

It helps that Maria Klawe, Harvey Mudd’s president since 2006, is a computer scientist herself. Her influence in making the field more attractive to women has been recognized by the White House’s chief technology officer. She has called out tech executives for not encouraging women. …

“Building confidence and a sense of belonging and a sense of community among these women by dumbing down the field makes such a huge difference,” she said. “Once you dumb down the field of change the myths and the cultural beliefs about computer science, that has a lot of momentum.”

FIFH.

That raises a question that ought to be of interest to investors: Does the increasing campus hysteria and antirationality portend bad news for Silicon Valley? If students increasingly grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules, will they be able to code emotionless computers as well as in the past?

Yes, and no. But globalist oligarchs rejoice; another excuse for open borders! The real bad news will ultimately be native labor’s problem. But really, if every American was employed at a good-paying job, would that stop racism? Would that stop sexism, or gender discrimination?

And note the confidence-diminishing and discouragement campaign, to go along with the confidence-building and encouragement campaign:

To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. They urged students to save their more advanced conversations for time with their teachers outside of class.

I blame Yale president Peter Salovey for this mess. When that silly black girl — a Yale undergraduate — was caught on video screaming her head off at Nicholas and Erika Christakis (the former master and associate master of Silliman College, who ultimately resigned their posts at Yale), Salovey should have expelled her posthaste, and refunded any monies her parents had paid for that academic year, together with a letter to the parents explaining that any student who behaved as their daughter did didn’t deserve to attend Yale.

Harsh? You bet. But if Salovey had kicked the girl out of Yale, and had stuck to his guns after the inevitable criticism from students and faculty (not to mention the forces of Organized Blackdom), everyone would have known where the line was, and that crossing it meant likely expulsion. Other college presidents would have taken notice, and possibly followed suit: when Yale talks, other schools listen.

If the “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals” at Middlebury had thought that their conduct vis-a-vis Charles Murray might get them thrown out of school, would they have dared to stir up and commit violent acts, against a Middlebury professor, no less? Would this nonsense at the Claremont Colleges (CMC, Pomona and Harvey Mudd) be happening right now if the college presidents involved could say, “Well, if Yale doesn’t put up with this nonsense, we won’t, either”?

Does anyone who remembers the late John Silber, former president of Boston University, think Silber would have tolerated any of this?

Receiving his Bradley Prize a week or two ago, Walter Williams observed that it was his great good fortune to attend school at at time when his teachers didn’t give a damn about his self-esteem.

Anyone teaching at the university level, even the top schools, has seen a decline in student quality. The students are very adept at taking SAT/ACT tests, but that does not carry over to an ability to do academic work.

There was a not so good movie a bit back called Get Him to the Greek, in which a pop-singer goes all We Are the World and culturally appropriates African music. His drummer is an American black who describes the performance visage he puts on as "Africa Face." Africa Face consists of a broad, unchanging smile, like you might find on the face of an ecstatic simpleton. That's what I picture when I hear "sunny disposition."

I suppose as he descended toward his grave, there was a Black Hole Sun effect on the man with the sunny disposition's smile. Slowly it expanded until he becomes a ln inhuman ghoul.

Maybe my imagination is running away with itself. But all the article told me is he was sunny and now he's dead. What about the color of his shirt or his favorite tv show? Huh?

I have both STEM BS and MS from two different schools, never experienced a problem or attitude due to being female.

There were some women who really wanted the degrees but whined about how hard it was. They tried different tricks to get out if more difficult classes or to get better grades than they deserved. It was embarrassing but the had no shame. The decent students understood who knew their stuff & who didn’t.

"more than half — 55% — of the latest class of computer science graduates were women, compared to roughly 10% a decade ago"

As Steve has often pointed out, twenty years back IT was a good and remunerative field for bright women. In my experience they had a slight bias towards analysis (esp business analysis) which was often better paid work than programming.

In the outsourced, H1B world they may find things a little different (in the UK, Indian doctors have above-average rates of sexual harassment of nurses and patients, but I have no data or anecdote on Indian IT managers).

Future historians will marvel at the fact that the most successful civilization in history – one with almost unimaginable scientific achievements – was brought down by its inability (or, perhaps, unwillingness) to understand why a square peg didn’t fit into a round hole.

This is sad. I went to Harvey Mudd in the 90's and it was always the one place at the Claremont Colleges that didn't go for these sorts of shenanigans. I would hope the strikers are just a vocal minority.

Any parent knows that giving in to the demands and tantrums of a small child will get you an unpleasant and hard to control kid in short order that will think nothing of blowing up in any setting to get their way. Obviously large swathes of society have been given the green light to act this way as near-adults and then carry this into college, careers, and our culture at large.

We need a sea change in our culture at the earliest levels if we want to have a prayer of a cohesive and successful society a generation from now.

My hunch is that the proportion of non-parents in leadership positions has increased by an order of magnitude. Perhaps this is an underlying factor in all this nonsense.

Poor kids, they don't have the ability to keep up with the intense work load of a serious school like Harvey Mudd. If they had wanted the college experience and the degree, they could have attended a less demanding uni. What they really wanted was the prestige of attending a good school. Sad!

Should have gone to Harvard/Yale/Princeton. Tastes great, less filling!

"more than half — 55% — of the latest class of computer science graduates were women, compared to roughly 10% a decade ago"

As Steve has often pointed out, twenty years back IT was a good and remunerative field for bright women. In my experience they had a slight bias towards analysis (esp business analysis) which was often better paid work than programming.

In the outsourced, H1B world they may find things a little different (in the UK, Indian doctors have above-average rates of sexual harassment of nurses and patients, but I have no data or anecdote on Indian IT managers).

Stories like this are so discouraging. I have a son who is an indifferent student (currently ninth grade) who loves programming. He has taught himself Java and a language he tells me is basically C++. He saved money and built his own gaming PC. He programs plug=ins for game sites and lots of other stuff that I don’t understand. I suspect undergraduate computer programming will be very easy for him despite his high school gpa. So is he the kid that Harvey Mudd is trying to disadvantage in favor of women and POC who didn’t spend their childhoods programming? Will there be a place for another white guy who loves computers and just wants to program?

The average GPA at Harvey Mudd is 4.11. If his GPA is poor, he doesn't have much of a chance no matter what identity boxes he checks. There will be plenty of kids with high GPAs and high scores who also know how to program.
http://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/Harvey-Mudd-SAT-scores-GPA

I have 30 years in IT, most of them in Application Development. Your son definately has a future, but due to H1b it will be lower middle class until he pays dues and differentiates his skills and creativity from the Indians. Fortunately, that's not too difficult, but it does take time and diligence and, ideally, a good mentor. I have a hard time finding American java programmers.

I make less today than I did 10 years ago, but I know how to say "bullshit" in Hindi.

"He programs plug=ins for game sites and lots of other stuff that I don’t understand."

Your kid doesn't need to go to college. Tell him to start his own business straight out of high school. Just tell him to start charging for his services. If he's smart and self-directed enough to learn a programming language in ninth grade, he can learn fine on his own without college professors. If you insist on an education, send him to local junior colleges and tell him to take nothing but computer courses while he builds his business on the side. It'll be a lot cheaper and they won't harbor SJW nonsense.

If he does eventually decide to work for somebody else, a background in running his own business and doing his own programming for clients will be far more impressive than a degree from a fancy school. People tend to forget that employers want experienced employees who can do the job at a professional level more than they want someone with a degree who's never worked a job.

If I was him, I would look into nanodegrees more than any elite college. There are plenty of good technical universities beyond that, though at some point, you're just getting the degree of the piece of paper that increases your pay. Its probably worth it to get that piece of paper, though, and the various internship opportunities and the like so as long as he's careful with the debt incurred.

I just have to smirk when the pampered pets whine about the workload. Did you not realize your application was to engineering college, poor darlings? Did ‘Harvey Mudd’ sound like a college run by a kindly cartoon character? Alas, I regret to inform you that this is just preparation for your chosen profession, which is difficult, time-consuming and thankless too. Enjoy it to whatever extent you can.

Pericles, Years ago there was a funny sports writer for one of the Buffalo newspapers. Every year he had a build up to the annual Harvey Mudd-General Beadle College football game. I actually thought they were made up colleges. Now Harvey Mudd is on tract to be the punchline in a lot of jokes.

Colleges definitely need to spend more money on counselling. Just look how great counselling is for lowering divorce rates and turning around homeless military vets and drug addicts. Most of them are cured in just a few sessions. If we could only spend more money on the miracle cure that is person-centred counselling then utopia would be just around the corner.

Have you noticed that whenever some recovering drug addict or other social hard-case is interviewed, they always indicate that – after they turn their life around – they want to become a counselor. I guess it’s good to have drug counselors who used to be addicts – they might be able to hook you up with some drugs.

Too bad the fools at Harvey Mudd in their excitement elected a greater fool. It takes just one incompetent captain to run the ship aground.

But not all is lost. Perhaps Harvey Mudd can instead refocus on gender and racial issues in engineering. Such worthy causes, and much more contemporary than stolid old mechanics. If there is an endowment, it can finally be put to good use in what we might call a ‘Klawe-back’.

This is sad. I went to Harvey Mudd in the 90's and it was always the one place at the Claremont Colleges that didn't go for these sorts of shenanigans. I would hope the strikers are just a vocal minority.

I would hope the strikers are just a vocal minority.

Sure, and homosexuals and transsexuals are just a vocal minority, and they’ve had nearly no impact at all.

It seems fairly obvious that all this tension on campus is fundamentally the result of mismatch. It’s one thing to be admitted to some “studies” program where you can fake it, but there’s no faking an engineering /programming curriculum. The standard for admitting males (esp. Asian males) are as high as ever, even higher because there are far fewer seats available for them. They can try to intimidate these boys to keep their mouth shut and not ask any challenging advanced questions in class when it’s clear that their classmates don’t even get the basics, but ultimately students know where they stand. And this creates a lot of tension which sometimes comes out as anger.

One of my memories from law school was being asked by one of the black students to study with him for the contracts exam. I don’t think I got the full implication at the time, being naive to things like mismatch, but even then I detected the desperate odor of flop sweat in his pleas. In retrospect, the poor fellow must have been in over his head and was hoping that some of my intellectual Magic Dirt would rub off on him. So I told him, f*ck off, you should have stuck with roundball and not tried to play the jewboys’ game. No, actually I didn’t, but honestly I don’t think I was much help to him – I tend to understand stuff holistically and intuitively and it’s hard for me to teach others who need it all spelled out for them step by step. I can usually tell you the right answer but not how I got to the answer.

Heck, on the brightest side, perhaps it will become common knowledge that education is largely a bubble and university credentials will have an increasingly weak metric to the actual productivity of the individual.

My observations suggest that two things inevitably reduce the quality of a great college or university. The first is admitting intellectually inferior students because they are women, Negroes, or from some other so called “minority” group or for any other reason. The second is appointing women to positions where they exercise a major influence over academic and administrative policies.

It’s obvious that admitting intellectually inferior students is likely to lower the quality of an academic institution. Why female leadership should have the same effect is less clear. But over the years I’ve seen the deleterious effects in several academic institutions to which I have had strong ties. I’m not even tempted to speculate why this might be.

Data please. My alma maters are both headed by women for several years now (one Ivy, one state flagship). One is flourishing, the other is floundering. But I'm uncomfortable extrapolating from personal anecdote.

Yet you raise an excellent point. It would be interesting to see how leadership in academia has been impacted by gender and ethnicity. Inevitably, it's subjective. But I'd bet we could all put together our anecdotes and see if a pattern emerges.

I plan on starting a hedge fund where you CAN SPECULATE on such issues. My fund's strategy will be to sell short all companies who have a large portion of minority/women executives. Black women CEOs especially. I will use analyst justification to couch my true arguments to avoid negative publicity.

If alt-right/HBD theorem is correct, we should see outsized, abnormal returns that make me exceedingly wealthy and improves economic capital allocation.

I think it's fairly obvious - most of those women are themselves the product of affirmative action and when they are appointed, their mission turns toward more of the same and less of whatever made the organization great in the 1st place.

I'm not sure what you say is 100% true, though it often is. For example, Amy Gutmann has done a reasonably good job at Penn and no one seems to think that it has declined under her administration. She has not gotten Penn into PC hot water as did the male hack Sheldon Hackney with the famous "water buffalo" incident.

I don't think universities even consider white, non-Jewish men anymore when they have to hire a new president. It's pretty shocking and makes me sick. Cornell just hired a woman as it's new president. The previous president was a woman and the two prior ones were Jewish men, I believe.

Here are some more complete stats. Summary: since 2010, whites down 35%, asians up 7%, blacks up 257%, latinos up 147%.
https://www.hmc.edu/institutional-research/institutional-statistics/institutional-statistics-students/student-enrollment-raceethnicity/

To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. They urged students to save their more advanced conversations for time with their teachers outside of class.

The Harvey Mudd policies would seem to open up many potential lawsuits by aggrieved male students (and their parents), that is if they weren’t too busy completing problem sets. The myopia and lack of a sense of cause-effect among administrators is an invitation to further reduction in the Academy, and of the Lyceum. Either the students can learn material or they can’t, and all the posters, pep talks and thumbs on the scales won’t change that.

Any truth to the rumor that there is a new law school planned on campus? Harvey Mudd Law School, where bar passage is optional. New logo is HMLS, pronounced Homeless.

Ivy, in all the years that I was running jobs and projects or events, I NEVER pulled a good worker aside and said...."Slow down, you're making the other guys look bad." Affirmative Action causes the mixing of good employees with the unqualified. No employer would willing create a situation like this.

There was a not so good movie a bit back called Get Him to the Greek, in which a pop-singer goes all We Are the World and culturally appropriates African music. His drummer is an American black who describes the performance visage he puts on as "Africa Face." Africa Face consists of a broad, unchanging smile, like you might find on the face of an ecstatic simpleton. That's what I picture when I hear "sunny disposition."

I suppose as he descended toward his grave, there was a Black Hole Sun effect on the man with the sunny disposition's smile. Slowly it expanded until he becomes a ln inhuman ghoul.

Maybe my imagination is running away with itself. But all the article told me is he was sunny and now he's dead. What about the color of his shirt or his favorite tv show? Huh?

Maybe my imagination is running away with itself. But all the article told me is he was sunny and now he’s dead.

That’s the way he would have wanted to be buried, sunny side up, not over-easy. His 2nd choice would have been an inexpensive Waffle House burial: scattered, covered, and smothered*.

If this continues that college will no longer be good and America will no longer have to admit that one of its best schools is called 'Harvey Mudd'.

Heck, on the brightest side, perhaps it will become common knowledge that education is largely a bubble and university credentials will have an increasingly weak metric to the actual productivity of the individual.

There is a really elite programming competition, the ACM Southern California regional. The first year I competed, in the 90s, there were three teams from Caltech and two or three from Harvey Mudd. Being from Canada I’d never heard of Harvey Mudd.

The first thought that pops into mind is what an unlovely name for a college, and the second is Harry Mudd, the “scoundrel, reprobate, con-man, forger, thief, and sociopath” from Star Trek TOS.

One of my profs. had visited the college and said the kids there always looked tired and drawn out from overwork. More demanding than Caltec apparently. One grad I know retired a millionaire from Microsoft in his mid thirties.

At the ACM competition, of the more than 40 colleges and university teams attending, Caltec and Harvey Mudd took first, second, third, fourth, and fifth place. There I am counting the prime factors of a million factorial using a third century BC algorithm (seive of Eratosthenes, basically middle school math) and I hear the team next to us saying “let’s use a quadratic seive.” No idea what that is.

My observations suggest that two things inevitably reduce the quality of a great college or university. The first is admitting intellectually inferior students because they are women, Negroes, or from some other so called "minority" group or for any other reason. The second is appointing women to positions where they exercise a major influence over academic and administrative policies.

It's obvious that admitting intellectually inferior students is likely to lower the quality of an academic institution. Why female leadership should have the same effect is less clear. But over the years I've seen the deleterious effects in several academic institutions to which I have had strong ties. I'm not even tempted to speculate why this might be.

Data please. My alma maters are both headed by women for several years now (one Ivy, one state flagship). One is flourishing, the other is floundering. But I’m uncomfortable extrapolating from personal anecdote.

Yet you raise an excellent point. It would be interesting to see how leadership in academia has been impacted by gender and ethnicity. Inevitably, it’s subjective. But I’d bet we could all put together our anecdotes and see if a pattern emerges.

Perhaps "inevitably" is too strong a word to use regarding the deleterious quality of female academic leadership. However, my personal experiences have suggested that females in the highest levels of academic administration do lower the academic quality of colleges and universities. I'm sure there are female academic administrators who've improved the quality of education in their institutions. My observations and experience suggest to me that such are rare.

Doing a study as some have suggested would be almost impossible. To start with there will be disagreement whether it is creating or destroying a "secure and nurturing" environment for today's student snowflakes that constitutes an improvement in a college's or university's academic environment.

Poor kids, they don't have the ability to keep up with the intense work load of a serious school like Harvey Mudd. If they had wanted the college experience and the degree, they could have attended a less demanding uni. What they really wanted was the prestige of attending a good school. Sad!

Anon, while my head was spinning gears trying to think of a comment for this article, you said it all in three sentences and an extra word.

Any parent knows that giving in to the demands and tantrums of a small child will get you an unpleasant and hard to control kid in short order that will think nothing of blowing up in any setting to get their way. Obviously large swathes of society have been given the green light to act this way as near-adults and then carry this into college, careers, and our culture at large.

We need a sea change in our culture at the earliest levels if we want to have a prayer of a cohesive and successful society a generation from now.

Arc, My daughter is a psychologist who will tell you that most of her problem kids are the result of poor parenting, the rest have diagnosable disorders. The parents create a problem and then hand it off to someone else to fix. On the other hand, letting unprepared and unqualified students into a challenging academic college is doomed from the start.

Stories like this are so discouraging. I have a son who is an indifferent student (currently ninth grade) who loves programming. He has taught himself Java and a language he tells me is basically C++. He saved money and built his own gaming PC. He programs plug=ins for game sites and lots of other stuff that I don't understand. I suspect undergraduate computer programming will be very easy for him despite his high school gpa. So is he the kid that Harvey Mudd is trying to disadvantage in favor of women and POC who didn't spend their childhoods programming? Will there be a place for another white guy who loves computers and just wants to program?

The average GPA at Harvey Mudd is 4.11. If his GPA is poor, he doesn’t have much of a chance no matter what identity boxes he checks. There will be plenty of kids with high GPAs and high scores who also know how to program.

I just have to smirk when the pampered pets whine about the workload. Did you not realize your application was to engineering college, poor darlings? Did 'Harvey Mudd' sound like a college run by a kindly cartoon character? Alas, I regret to inform you that this is just preparation for your chosen profession, which is difficult, time-consuming and thankless too. Enjoy it to whatever extent you can.

Pericles, Years ago there was a funny sports writer for one of the Buffalo newspapers. Every year he had a build up to the annual Harvey Mudd-General Beadle College football game. I actually thought they were made up colleges. Now Harvey Mudd is on tract to be the punchline in a lot of jokes.

It’s a testament to how much of the private (not to mention public) sector now operates as monopolies that the demand for truly intelligent and productive employees is so low. This manifests in academia where the prizes of monopoly are sought in earnest by the professional rent seeking class.

My observations suggest that two things inevitably reduce the quality of a great college or university. The first is admitting intellectually inferior students because they are women, Negroes, or from some other so called "minority" group or for any other reason. The second is appointing women to positions where they exercise a major influence over academic and administrative policies.

It's obvious that admitting intellectually inferior students is likely to lower the quality of an academic institution. Why female leadership should have the same effect is less clear. But over the years I've seen the deleterious effects in several academic institutions to which I have had strong ties. I'm not even tempted to speculate why this might be.

To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. They urged students to save their more advanced conversations for time with their teachers outside of class.

The Harvey Mudd policies would seem to open up many potential lawsuits by aggrieved male students (and their parents), that is if they weren't too busy completing problem sets. The myopia and lack of a sense of cause-effect among administrators is an invitation to further reduction in the Academy, and of the Lyceum. Either the students can learn material or they can't, and all the posters, pep talks and thumbs on the scales won't change that.

Any truth to the rumor that there is a new law school planned on campus? Harvey Mudd Law School, where bar passage is optional. New logo is HMLS, pronounced Homeless.

Ivy, in all the years that I was running jobs and projects or events, I NEVER pulled a good worker aside and said….”Slow down, you’re making the other guys look bad.” Affirmative Action causes the mixing of good employees with the unqualified. No employer would willing create a situation like this.

No [private sector, non-government contractor] employer would willing create a situation like this. And people wonder about lower labor force participation rates and discouraged workers, when there is so much BS that goes into what used to be fairly straight-forward work.

I have been told that and its not as unusual as you make it sound. Now, in a position of management, I can even see why this is the case - to the extent that you want employees to be more or less fungible units in a process, you do not want outliers and especially not in function. Its pretty popular in major corporations, at any rate.

In your projects, for example, have you ever used ITIL or Six Sigma methodology? Whether you agree with them or not, they are popular and there's this notion of a functional group, of which an employee is a member of. If a member of your functional group exceeds scope in his purpose, then its like having a cog in the machine that's doing too much. You have to stop it, or some people read it as such, anyway.

I had an old boss who was an expert in that methodology, fairly efficiently converting people into replaceable machines and was chalking up to a quarter million in his last job...and then got replaced by outsourced Polish employees(don't ask me how committee of Eastern European management replaces director, I don't know). Its a bit tragic, though also, amusing.

With science and math, there is no way you can bullshit your way through the course work like you can with a “soft”science. There comes a time when the black / female / AA student is exposed as not being able to cut the mustard and has some sort of social justice freak out to mask the real problem. At least they are not drawing swastikas on the dorm room doors.

My observations suggest that two things inevitably reduce the quality of a great college or university. The first is admitting intellectually inferior students because they are women, Negroes, or from some other so called "minority" group or for any other reason. The second is appointing women to positions where they exercise a major influence over academic and administrative policies.

It's obvious that admitting intellectually inferior students is likely to lower the quality of an academic institution. Why female leadership should have the same effect is less clear. But over the years I've seen the deleterious effects in several academic institutions to which I have had strong ties. I'm not even tempted to speculate why this might be.

I plan on starting a hedge fund where you CAN SPECULATE on such issues. My fund’s strategy will be to sell short all companies who have a large portion of minority/women executives. Black women CEOs especially. I will use analyst justification to couch my true arguments to avoid negative publicity.

If alt-right/HBD theorem is correct, we should see outsized, abnormal returns that make me exceedingly wealthy and improves economic capital allocation.

Pericles, Years ago there was a funny sports writer for one of the Buffalo newspapers. Every year he had a build up to the annual Harvey Mudd-General Beadle College football game. I actually thought they were made up colleges. Now Harvey Mudd is on tract to be the punchline in a lot of jokes.

With your already huge military construction costs, you will also add the cost of redesigning submarines for female submariners. I thought there were no differences between men and women. Turns out not being able to operate the equipment efficiently could have been a criterion but that will be rectified on the US taxpayer’s dime. I can’t begin to imagine what that will cost.

Ivy, in all the years that I was running jobs and projects or events, I NEVER pulled a good worker aside and said...."Slow down, you're making the other guys look bad." Affirmative Action causes the mixing of good employees with the unqualified. No employer would willing create a situation like this.

No [private sector, non-government contractor] employer would willing create a situation like this. And people wonder about lower labor force participation rates and discouraged workers, when there is so much BS that goes into what used to be fairly straight-forward work.

Those kids do too believe in absolute truth: the absolute truth spouted by idiotic social justice warriors about their marginalization. All other truths are relative, but the truth of the traditionally marginalized is absolute.

The answer is right in front of everybody but most people are willfully blind to see:

Go to any TV show about building hot rods, do-it-yourself programs, or anything regarding mastering some skill and what do you see?

MOSTLY WHITE MEN

They seem to be about 90% of the people who actually give a shit enough about something to pour their whole lives into. So, regardless of whether they are smarter or not, they tend to accomplish more because it interests them more and they spend more time on it.

All these attempts to get women and minorities into programs are doomed to failure because most of these people frankly really don’t care about what they are doing.

Women in programming just want a job as a cog in the machine (of course with more salary and recognition than they deserve) until something better comes along. The guys want to do great things – even if it kills them. Unfortunately, this allows hucksters like Steve Jobs to take advantage of them.

My observations suggest that two things inevitably reduce the quality of a great college or university. The first is admitting intellectually inferior students because they are women, Negroes, or from some other so called "minority" group or for any other reason. The second is appointing women to positions where they exercise a major influence over academic and administrative policies.

It's obvious that admitting intellectually inferior students is likely to lower the quality of an academic institution. Why female leadership should have the same effect is less clear. But over the years I've seen the deleterious effects in several academic institutions to which I have had strong ties. I'm not even tempted to speculate why this might be.

I think it’s fairly obvious – most of those women are themselves the product of affirmative action and when they are appointed, their mission turns toward more of the same and less of whatever made the organization great in the 1st place.

I’m not sure what you say is 100% true, though it often is. For example, Amy Gutmann has done a reasonably good job at Penn and no one seems to think that it has declined under her administration. She has not gotten Penn into PC hot water as did the male hack Sheldon Hackney with the famous “water buffalo” incident.

Ivy, in all the years that I was running jobs and projects or events, I NEVER pulled a good worker aside and said...."Slow down, you're making the other guys look bad." Affirmative Action causes the mixing of good employees with the unqualified. No employer would willing create a situation like this.

I am skeptical you’ve ever been in a position of leadership. You react poorly to any criticism.

In my experience – encompassing the trades, the military, academia, and corporate America – reacting poorly to criticsim was demonstrably some kind of prerequisite to advancemnt into a position of leadership.

(I'm not saying such people were good leaders, mind you, but then, reports of meritocracy's survival have been greatly exaggerated. Scheming, cronyism, and the like, however, are doing quite well, thank you....)

Arc, My daughter is a psychologist who will tell you that most of her problem kids are the result of poor parenting, the rest have diagnosable disorders. The parents create a problem and then hand it off to someone else to fix. On the other hand, letting unprepared and unqualified students into a challenging academic college is doomed from the start.

Having parents who do not teach and reinforce proper behavior leads to children with behavior problems. Harris's research doesn't get cited when we talk about black kids acting up in class.

Judith Rich Harris's research simply exonerates her own substandard parenting. She became bed-ridden when her bio daughter was 10 and adopted daughter was 6. Harris attributes the adopted daughter being rebellious to peers instead of acknowledging that the girl lost four critical years of mothering that her older sister received.

A little late here to the thread, but I read that book. It's very interesting, and not the crap I would have expected from a psychologist. In fact the author writes a scathing criticism of psychological research somewhere near the beginning that I could have written myself.

There is a problem with her assumption that the "nature" part (1/2?) of children's development is almost all from their peers, not parents. Even if that's correct:

a) The parents can have a big influence on who the peers are.
b) Good parents can have an effect of negating a lot more of the crap that kids may get from their peers, and they have 5-6 years to do this. If a kid can really trust the parents, even when he is influenced by his peers, he will still trust the parents advice and guidance over his friends.
Hence, don't lie to your kid.

I'd like to write a review on this book. I turned it back in to the library.

My observations suggest that two things inevitably reduce the quality of a great college or university. The first is admitting intellectually inferior students because they are women, Negroes, or from some other so called "minority" group or for any other reason. The second is appointing women to positions where they exercise a major influence over academic and administrative policies.

It's obvious that admitting intellectually inferior students is likely to lower the quality of an academic institution. Why female leadership should have the same effect is less clear. But over the years I've seen the deleterious effects in several academic institutions to which I have had strong ties. I'm not even tempted to speculate why this might be.

I don’t think universities even consider white, non-Jewish men anymore when they have to hire a new president. It’s pretty shocking and makes me sick. Cornell just hired a woman as it’s new president. The previous president was a woman and the two prior ones were Jewish men, I believe.

Stories like this are so discouraging. I have a son who is an indifferent student (currently ninth grade) who loves programming. He has taught himself Java and a language he tells me is basically C++. He saved money and built his own gaming PC. He programs plug=ins for game sites and lots of other stuff that I don't understand. I suspect undergraduate computer programming will be very easy for him despite his high school gpa. So is he the kid that Harvey Mudd is trying to disadvantage in favor of women and POC who didn't spend their childhoods programming? Will there be a place for another white guy who loves computers and just wants to program?

I have 30 years in IT, most of them in Application Development. Your son definately has a future, but due to H1b it will be lower middle class until he pays dues and differentiates his skills and creativity from the Indians. Fortunately, that’s not too difficult, but it does take time and diligence and, ideally, a good mentor. I have a hard time finding American java programmers.

I make less today than I did 10 years ago, but I know how to say “bullshit” in Hindi.

Ah, so good news/bad news for him. What explains the lower pay now? Is there less demand or more competition?
My son does do a pretty funny imitation of an Indian in tech support... but I'm thinking that won't help him.

I am skeptical you've ever been in a position of leadership. You react poorly to any criticism.

In my experience – encompassing the trades, the military, academia, and corporate America – reacting poorly to criticsim was demonstrably some kind of prerequisite to advancemnt into a position of leadership.

(I’m not saying such people were good leaders, mind you, but then, reports of meritocracy’s survival have been greatly exaggerated. Scheming, cronyism, and the like, however, are doing quite well, thank you….)

“They urged students to save their more advanced conversations for time with their teachers outside of class.”

This is the most egregious statement in the article. Truth and curiosity don’t matter to our society anymore. The quest to understand reality as it truly is has ended. The quest to mold reality and conform it to preconceived political standards has begun. Because feelings. The Enlightenment has truly ended.

There is a really elite programming competition, the ACM Southern California regional. The first year I competed, in the 90s, there were three teams from Caltech and two or three from Harvey Mudd. Being from Canada I'd never heard of Harvey Mudd.

The first thought that pops into mind is what an unlovely name for a college, and the second is Harry Mudd, the "scoundrel, reprobate, con-man, forger, thief, and sociopath" from Star Trek TOS.

One of my profs. had visited the college and said the kids there always looked tired and drawn out from overwork. More demanding than Caltec apparently. One grad I know retired a millionaire from Microsoft in his mid thirties.

At the ACM competition, of the more than 40 colleges and university teams attending, Caltec and Harvey Mudd took first, second, third, fourth, and fifth place. There I am counting the prime factors of a million factorial using a third century BC algorithm (seive of Eratosthenes, basically middle school math) and I hear the team next to us saying "let's use a quadratic seive." No idea what that is.

Everyone at the competition was smarter than me. So I used a trick familiar to most middling intelligent high school students. Get into the mind of the test maker.

Factoring an unknown number of numbers of the form n factorial between n = 2 and n = 1,000,000 on an underpowered computer with only two minutes of CPU time means that it is a trick question. The grad students on the Caltec team might have used a quadratic seive but it is massive overkill. The test makers could not expect the programmers from Cal State Northridge, Cal Poly, or even Santa Barbara City College for heaven's sake, to have a senior level course in number theory behind them. So I went looking for the trick.

At my public high school we got no number theory, but the kind of student who reads pop math books in the library in grade eight because he's too short sighted to play baseball after school anymore is bound to come across the 2200 year old Seive of Eratosthenes. It was the fastest solution and quickest to code.

Just possibly a naïve brute force attack where you skip multiples of 2, 3, 5, and 7 would work. On a programmable calculator without room to declare a million element array it could be solved by precomputing a larger table of primes (I am going to try that for fun on an HP 35s). One solution used about four hours of CPU time to calculate all possible answers and they incorporated that output into their program. A minute before the competition ended they submitted a multimillion character program to the compiler. It crashed all our desperate last minute submissions. There was a slow moving wave of laughter as each team told the next team about it. It took hours to clean up the mess and grade the submissions, so we all got to chat. One judge from the ACM told me that he'd gotten sidelined by his interest in computers, so after decades in the field was retiring to a life of amateur astronomy.

To conclude our statement, we invite you to respond to this email by Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 4:07pm (since we have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives).

What does this mean? I mean, much of the letter is incomprehensible, but this is not even postmodern gibberish. I just have no clue what this is saying. They want a response by Tuesday because they ” have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives”?

"...professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. ..."

We all know how "Shut a Fuck,Donny!"
treatment of timid Betas had a weird ,
but uber-beneficial impact on our society.

Not even Almighty Bitchvanka aint got sh*t on these basement warring, anti-snowflake milenials.

They will continue to intimidate by answering all questions.

They own the IT Universe , while the wimmin continue to play in a virtual Mudd.

Praise the Algorithm.

Yeah, that’s the para. How unfair it is that all those spergy guys who spent their teenage years amongst the Dorito crumbs learning C++ for fun have an advantage over Emily and LaQueesha.

I plan on starting a hedge fund where you CAN SPECULATE on such issues. My fund's strategy will be to sell short all companies who have a large portion of minority/women executives. Black women CEOs especially. I will use analyst justification to couch my true arguments to avoid negative publicity.

If alt-right/HBD theorem is correct, we should see outsized, abnormal returns that make me exceedingly wealthy and improves economic capital allocation.

If you can't beat them, bet against them in a fair, public market.

“My fund’s strategy will be to sell short all companies who have a large portion of minority/women executives. “

I wonder if anyone’s done the sums on SP500 companies with women CEOs or COOs? Shouldn’t be too hard to do.

To conclude our statement, we invite you to respond to this email by Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 4:07pm (since we have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives).

What does this mean? I mean, much of the letter is incomprehensible, but this is not even postmodern gibberish. I just have no clue what this is saying. They want a response by Tuesday because they " have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives"?

Maybe they mean “have [no] more energy”?

I’ve noticed lately a lot of self-pity in SJW songs about being tired. I guess it’s all that Emotional Labor. I don’t know where it comes from, maybe a recent Beyonce song?

Miracle cures.... We once took our adopted daughter in for counseling and therapy. It appeared to go nowhere over a multi-month period. I asked the psychologist about the "game plan" ... "How is this therapy suppose to work?" His answer:

"The objective is for me to develop a close relationship with (your daughter). Then, she will be more willing to open up and share her innermost feelings. When in the open, we can work on them ...." Then, I asked. "How long does this take?" His reply, "Years!"

Let's see, we met for 50 minutes a week. At least ten of these were spent on administration. So, the psychologist was going to develop a close relationship with our daughter ... a professional relationship I presume ... 40 minutes a week that would include her intimating to him her innermost thoughts, feelings, and fears. Is it possible to develop a close and trusting relationship like this with a stranger you meet and talk to for slightly more than 30 minutes a week?

The psychologist drove a Mercedes. I canceled the therapy sessions.

Is it possible to develop a close and trusting relationship like this with a stranger you meet and talk to for slightly more than 30 minutes a week?

I would think that should be highly possible. Especially when the interaction is with someone who is trained to develop that kind of relationship.

Miracle cures.... We once took our adopted daughter in for counseling and therapy. It appeared to go nowhere over a multi-month period. I asked the psychologist about the "game plan" ... "How is this therapy suppose to work?" His answer:

"The objective is for me to develop a close relationship with (your daughter). Then, she will be more willing to open up and share her innermost feelings. When in the open, we can work on them ...." Then, I asked. "How long does this take?" His reply, "Years!"

Let's see, we met for 50 minutes a week. At least ten of these were spent on administration. So, the psychologist was going to develop a close relationship with our daughter ... a professional relationship I presume ... 40 minutes a week that would include her intimating to him her innermost thoughts, feelings, and fears. Is it possible to develop a close and trusting relationship like this with a stranger you meet and talk to for slightly more than 30 minutes a week?

The psychologist drove a Mercedes. I canceled the therapy sessions.

Jester, man goes to a therapist. Complains that he can’t sleep because he knows there are monsters under his bed. Therapist schedules a series of sessions, two a week at $2oo per session and estimates it will take at least a year to get at the root of the problem and then eliminate this fear. Man never returns to the therapist, but he bumps into the therapist at the grocery store. Therapist inquires on why the patient never followed through on the therapy. Man says his brother-in-law told him he could cure him for $50. Therapist scoffs, how could that be? Brother-in-law is a carpenter, sawed the legs off my bed for $50.

Stories like this are so discouraging. I have a son who is an indifferent student (currently ninth grade) who loves programming. He has taught himself Java and a language he tells me is basically C++. He saved money and built his own gaming PC. He programs plug=ins for game sites and lots of other stuff that I don't understand. I suspect undergraduate computer programming will be very easy for him despite his high school gpa. So is he the kid that Harvey Mudd is trying to disadvantage in favor of women and POC who didn't spend their childhoods programming? Will there be a place for another white guy who loves computers and just wants to program?

“He programs plug=ins for game sites and lots of other stuff that I don’t understand.”

Your kid doesn’t need to go to college. Tell him to start his own business straight out of high school. Just tell him to start charging for his services. If he’s smart and self-directed enough to learn a programming language in ninth grade, he can learn fine on his own without college professors. If you insist on an education, send him to local junior colleges and tell him to take nothing but computer courses while he builds his business on the side. It’ll be a lot cheaper and they won’t harbor SJW nonsense.

If he does eventually decide to work for somebody else, a background in running his own business and doing his own programming for clients will be far more impressive than a degree from a fancy school. People tend to forget that employers want experienced employees who can do the job at a professional level more than they want someone with a degree who’s never worked a job.

I have both STEM BS and MS from two different schools, never experienced a problem or attitude due to being female.

There were some women who really wanted the degrees but whined about how hard it was. They tried different tricks to get out if more difficult classes or to get better grades than they deserved. It was embarrassing but the had no shame. The decent students understood who knew their stuff & who didn't.

I'll bet a lot of them work on college faculty now...

They tried different tricks to get out if more difficult classes or to get better grades than they deserved.

Trying to get classes to count towards a math degree that were at too low of a level (I.e. College algebra, a fine class to take but math degrees start above that) because they couldn't pass enough of the upper level electives( I.e. abstract algebra)

One woman succeeded in getting a community college consumer math class to count. Most of thought it was a load of bs that hurt the integrity of our degrees.

The answer is right in front of everybody but most people are willfully blind to see:

Go to any TV show about building hot rods, do-it-yourself programs, or anything regarding mastering some skill and what do you see?

MOSTLY WHITE MEN

They seem to be about 90% of the people who actually give a shit enough about something to pour their whole lives into. So, regardless of whether they are smarter or not, they tend to accomplish more because it interests them more and they spend more time on it.

All these attempts to get women and minorities into programs are doomed to failure because most of these people frankly really don't care about what they are doing.

Women in programming just want a job as a cog in the machine (of course with more salary and recognition than they deserve) until something better comes along. The guys want to do great things - even if it kills them. Unfortunately, this allows hucksters like Steve Jobs to take advantage of them.

Unfortunately, this allows hucksters like Steve Jobs to take advantage of them.

He routinely lied and abused his employees to get them to basically give up their entire lives with little in return (compared to Jobs himself) for it.

The stories of Jobs screwing employees are quite well known - starting with the initial IPO where he wanted to cut out employee #4 from getting any stock, to the creation of the Macintosh, to his screwing the employees of Pixar.

Miracle cures.... We once took our adopted daughter in for counseling and therapy. It appeared to go nowhere over a multi-month period. I asked the psychologist about the "game plan" ... "How is this therapy suppose to work?" His answer:

"The objective is for me to develop a close relationship with (your daughter). Then, she will be more willing to open up and share her innermost feelings. When in the open, we can work on them ...." Then, I asked. "How long does this take?" His reply, "Years!"

Let's see, we met for 50 minutes a week. At least ten of these were spent on administration. So, the psychologist was going to develop a close relationship with our daughter ... a professional relationship I presume ... 40 minutes a week that would include her intimating to him her innermost thoughts, feelings, and fears. Is it possible to develop a close and trusting relationship like this with a stranger you meet and talk to for slightly more than 30 minutes a week?

The psychologist drove a Mercedes. I canceled the therapy sessions.

Woody Allen used to say that he loved his therapist of 20+ years-and that maybe in 20 more years of therapy he would get better

Data please. My alma maters are both headed by women for several years now (one Ivy, one state flagship). One is flourishing, the other is floundering. But I'm uncomfortable extrapolating from personal anecdote.

Yet you raise an excellent point. It would be interesting to see how leadership in academia has been impacted by gender and ethnicity. Inevitably, it's subjective. But I'd bet we could all put together our anecdotes and see if a pattern emerges.

Captain, for what it is worth, Janet Napolitano is Chancellor of the California university system.

I don't blame these women at all. They should be protesting! If you knew anything about Harvey Mudd you would know he was the brother of Harry Mudd (formal name--Harcourt Fenton Mudd).

For those who are unfamiliar with Harry Mudd...he was a noted misogynist. Really, just a scoundrel.

Harry Mudd was engaged in the illegal sex trade, He would use plain-looking women who didn't have body-positive self images, and he would ply them with an illegal drug called the Venus Drug. The Venus Drug had the effect of making these these poor women appear absolutely irresistible. These women would remain 'beautiful' so long as they took the drug.

The M.O. behind Harry Mudd's scheme was to lure unsuspecting men into marriage. Then, these beautifult-but-significantly-overweight women would stop taking the Venus Drug and it would be revealed that they were carrying a "few extra pounds" along with some other warts. Of course the shallow, pig-husbands would want to dump them since they weren't so pretty after all. Harry Mudd would then step in and extract a ransom to nullify the marriage.

This was blatant misogyny! Harry Mudd was a misogynist and I have no doubt his brother, Harvey Mudd was a misogynist too! Harvey Mudd represents the disgusting practice of sexual slavery and these brave, body-positive women should demand that school officials change the name immediately. #IStandAgainstMudd.

For anyone who is confused, Harry Mudd = Star Trek character. I Googled it so you don’t have to.

By the way, guys named Mudd are not unknown in American history. Dr. Mudd was imprisoned for his role in the conspiracy to murder Abraham Lincoln, Roger Mudd was a prominent TV newsman, his son was head of Fannie Mae during the Housing Bubble.

No [private sector, non-government contractor] employer would willing create a situation like this. And people wonder about lower labor force participation rates and discouraged workers, when there is so much BS that goes into what used to be fairly straight-forward work.

Ivy, Thank you, I meant a non-government employer who doesn’t have to fill out employment diversity forms.

I don't blame these women at all. They should be protesting! If you knew anything about Harvey Mudd you would know he was the brother of Harry Mudd (formal name--Harcourt Fenton Mudd).

For those who are unfamiliar with Harry Mudd...he was a noted misogynist. Really, just a scoundrel.

Harry Mudd was engaged in the illegal sex trade, He would use plain-looking women who didn't have body-positive self images, and he would ply them with an illegal drug called the Venus Drug. The Venus Drug had the effect of making these these poor women appear absolutely irresistible. These women would remain 'beautiful' so long as they took the drug.

The M.O. behind Harry Mudd's scheme was to lure unsuspecting men into marriage. Then, these beautifult-but-significantly-overweight women would stop taking the Venus Drug and it would be revealed that they were carrying a "few extra pounds" along with some other warts. Of course the shallow, pig-husbands would want to dump them since they weren't so pretty after all. Harry Mudd would then step in and extract a ransom to nullify the marriage.

This was blatant misogyny! Harry Mudd was a misogynist and I have no doubt his brother, Harvey Mudd was a misogynist too! Harvey Mudd represents the disgusting practice of sexual slavery and these brave, body-positive women should demand that school officials change the name immediately. #IStandAgainstMudd.

For anyone who is confused, Harry Mudd = Star Trek character. I Googled it so you don't have to.

By the way, guys named Mudd are not unknown in American history. Dr. Mudd was imprisoned for his role in the conspiracy to murder Abraham Lincoln, Roger Mudd was a prominent TV newsman, his son was head of Fannie Mae during the Housing Bubble.

Stories like this are so discouraging. I have a son who is an indifferent student (currently ninth grade) who loves programming. He has taught himself Java and a language he tells me is basically C++. He saved money and built his own gaming PC. He programs plug=ins for game sites and lots of other stuff that I don't understand. I suspect undergraduate computer programming will be very easy for him despite his high school gpa. So is he the kid that Harvey Mudd is trying to disadvantage in favor of women and POC who didn't spend their childhoods programming? Will there be a place for another white guy who loves computers and just wants to program?

If I was him, I would look into nanodegrees more than any elite college. There are plenty of good technical universities beyond that, though at some point, you’re just getting the degree of the piece of paper that increases your pay. Its probably worth it to get that piece of paper, though, and the various internship opportunities and the like so as long as he’s careful with the debt incurred.

Ivy, in all the years that I was running jobs and projects or events, I NEVER pulled a good worker aside and said...."Slow down, you're making the other guys look bad." Affirmative Action causes the mixing of good employees with the unqualified. No employer would willing create a situation like this.

I have been told that and its not as unusual as you make it sound. Now, in a position of management, I can even see why this is the case – to the extent that you want employees to be more or less fungible units in a process, you do not want outliers and especially not in function. Its pretty popular in major corporations, at any rate.

In your projects, for example, have you ever used ITIL or Six Sigma methodology? Whether you agree with them or not, they are popular and there’s this notion of a functional group, of which an employee is a member of. If a member of your functional group exceeds scope in his purpose, then its like having a cog in the machine that’s doing too much. You have to stop it, or some people read it as such, anyway.

I had an old boss who was an expert in that methodology, fairly efficiently converting people into replaceable machines and was chalking up to a quarter million in his last job…and then got replaced by outsourced Polish employees(don’t ask me how committee of Eastern European management replaces director, I don’t know). Its a bit tragic, though also, amusing.

Dan, Thank you for the reply. In construction a foreman or general foreman often works side by side with his crew. On a job with a lot of paperwork and meetings you still have a sense of what your crew/crews are doing, as you worked in the trade.

I don't blame these women at all. They should be protesting! If you knew anything about Harvey Mudd you would know he was the brother of Harry Mudd (formal name--Harcourt Fenton Mudd).

For those who are unfamiliar with Harry Mudd...he was a noted misogynist. Really, just a scoundrel.

Harry Mudd was engaged in the illegal sex trade, He would use plain-looking women who didn't have body-positive self images, and he would ply them with an illegal drug called the Venus Drug. The Venus Drug had the effect of making these these poor women appear absolutely irresistible. These women would remain 'beautiful' so long as they took the drug.

The M.O. behind Harry Mudd's scheme was to lure unsuspecting men into marriage. Then, these beautifult-but-significantly-overweight women would stop taking the Venus Drug and it would be revealed that they were carrying a "few extra pounds" along with some other warts. Of course the shallow, pig-husbands would want to dump them since they weren't so pretty after all. Harry Mudd would then step in and extract a ransom to nullify the marriage.

This was blatant misogyny! Harry Mudd was a misogynist and I have no doubt his brother, Harvey Mudd was a misogynist too! Harvey Mudd represents the disgusting practice of sexual slavery and these brave, body-positive women should demand that school officials change the name immediately. #IStandAgainstMudd.

"more than half — 55% — of the latest class of computer science graduates were women, compared to roughly 10% a decade ago"

As Steve has often pointed out, twenty years back IT was a good and remunerative field for bright women. In my experience they had a slight bias towards analysis (esp business analysis) which was often better paid work than programming.

In the outsourced, H1B world they may find things a little different (in the UK, Indian doctors have above-average rates of sexual harassment of nurses and patients, but I have no data or anecdote on Indian IT managers).

Receiving his Bradley Prize a week or two ago, Walter Williams observed that it was his great good fortune to attend school at at time when his teachers didn't give a damn about his self-esteem.

Anyone teaching at the university level, even the top schools, has seen a decline in student quality. The students are very adept at taking SAT/ACT tests, but that does not carry over to an ability to do academic work.

Anyone teaching at the university, even the top schools, has seen a decline in student quality.

Receiving his Bradley Prize a week or two ago, Walter Williams observed that it was his great good fortune to attend school at at time when his teachers didn't give a damn about his self-esteem.

Anyone teaching at the university level, even the top schools, has seen a decline in student quality. The students are very adept at taking SAT/ACT tests, but that does not carry over to an ability to do academic work.

:

The ability to process abstract information is not the same thing as common sense and insight. That’s why so many employers value experience over education.

I'm familiar with Paul Soros and his fellowship for first and second generation Americans. One year I was surprised to find a Korean Social Justice Warrior. She was raised by Jews but left the family when she was a teen. Being East Asian she had no problem getting herself through Barnard with scholarships and working.

She grew up in a black and Hispanic neighborhood, has worked at an African American think tank, as a paralegal at a civil rights law firm, and as a Spanish translator for (alleged) victims of housing discrimination.

Stories like this are so discouraging. I have a son who is an indifferent student (currently ninth grade) who loves programming. He has taught himself Java and a language he tells me is basically C++. He saved money and built his own gaming PC. He programs plug=ins for game sites and lots of other stuff that I don't understand. I suspect undergraduate computer programming will be very easy for him despite his high school gpa. So is he the kid that Harvey Mudd is trying to disadvantage in favor of women and POC who didn't spend their childhoods programming? Will there be a place for another white guy who loves computers and just wants to program?

Having parents who do not teach and reinforce proper behavior leads to children with behavior problems. Harris’s research doesn’t get cited when we talk about black kids acting up in class.

Judith Rich Harris’s research simply exonerates her own substandard parenting. She became bed-ridden when her bio daughter was 10 and adopted daughter was 6. Harris attributes the adopted daughter being rebellious to peers instead of acknowledging that the girl lost four critical years of mothering that her older sister received.

Having parents who do not teach and reinforce proper behavior leads to children with behavior problems. Harris’s research doesn’t get cited when we talk about black kids acting up in class.

That's because black mis-behavior is largely genetic ... and you simply do not understand the arguments ... it is very clear that genes are in control and shared family environment is little more than noise for outcomes.

Data please. My alma maters are both headed by women for several years now (one Ivy, one state flagship). One is flourishing, the other is floundering. But I'm uncomfortable extrapolating from personal anecdote.

Yet you raise an excellent point. It would be interesting to see how leadership in academia has been impacted by gender and ethnicity. Inevitably, it's subjective. But I'd bet we could all put together our anecdotes and see if a pattern emerges.

Perhaps “inevitably” is too strong a word to use regarding the deleterious quality of female academic leadership. However, my personal experiences have suggested that females in the highest levels of academic administration do lower the academic quality of colleges and universities. I’m sure there are female academic administrators who’ve improved the quality of education in their institutions. My observations and experience suggest to me that such are rare.

Doing a study as some have suggested would be almost impossible. To start with there will be disagreement whether it is creating or destroying a “secure and nurturing” environment for today’s student snowflakes that constitutes an improvement in a college’s or university’s academic environment.

I’m sure there are female academic administrators who’ve improved the quality of education in their institutions. My observations and experience suggest to me that such are rare.

Yes, but why are they rare? Because women who really are willing and able are also rare, anyway, far rarer than similar men. Just privileging women to these positions does not work. You cannot make people qualified, talented or competent simply by credentialing or hiring them.

I plan on starting a hedge fund where you CAN SPECULATE on such issues. My fund's strategy will be to sell short all companies who have a large portion of minority/women executives. Black women CEOs especially. I will use analyst justification to couch my true arguments to avoid negative publicity.

If alt-right/HBD theorem is correct, we should see outsized, abnormal returns that make me exceedingly wealthy and improves economic capital allocation.

If you can't beat them, bet against them in a fair, public market.

Only if other people are not doing the same thing ; )

But seriously, this could be a good approach if you see a stock price spike upwards after a major diversity hire or policy change.

It's a testament to how much of the private (not to mention public) sector now operates as monopolies that the demand for truly intelligent and productive employees is so low. This manifests in academia where the prizes of monopoly are sought in earnest by the professional rent seeking class.

Good point. Perhaps the implicit idea is to rely on foreigners to supply the actual working engineers. Via the cloud, of course.

OT (I think; I'm never sure these days): George Soros had a brother, who had similar interests. New awards just released.

https://www.pdsoros.org/

I’m familiar with Paul Soros and his fellowship for first and second generation Americans. One year I was surprised to find a Korean Social Justice Warrior. She was raised by Jews but left the family when she was a teen. Being East Asian she had no problem getting herself through Barnard with scholarships and working.

She grew up in a black and Hispanic neighborhood, has worked at an African American think tank, as a paralegal at a civil rights law firm, and as a Spanish translator for (alleged) victims of housing discrimination.

Richard Spencer could teach us something about why women aren't going into computer science and other STEM fields.

Richard Spencer is clearly very intelligent -- watch him give an extemporaneous talk to know what I mean -- but I don't think he considers himself to be good at maths. How could that be? Surely someone whose brain ticks along as quickly as his does could easily become competent if not great at maths? He's what we call a 'humanities type'. Very smart verbally, but not so smart mathematically.

The reason he's bad at maths has nothing to do with his cognitive ability. The reason is simply that he's not interested in maths. That's how someone as smart as he is can be so bad at maths. Similarly, women aren't interested in maths and other STEM fields. That's why they're so bad at them.

Richard Spencer could teach us something about why women aren’t going into computer science and other STEM fields.

Richard Spencer is clearly very intelligent — watch him give an extemporaneous talk to know what I mean — but I don’t think he considers himself to be good at maths. How could that be? Surely someone whose brain ticks along as quickly as his does could easily become competent if not great at maths? He’s what we call a ‘humanities type’. Very smart verbally, but not so smart mathematically.

Because in STEM disposition is almost more important than intelligence. That’s why East Asians, including East Asian females, excel. They have the perfect disposition for this kind of work. STEM work is largely boring. The days of Robert Goddard and Alfred Lee Loomis are gone. Nowadays you are a cog in a wheel and are working on some small part of a defense-related system. IT work is pretty much glorified clerical work. And Silicon Valley is the new Madison Avenue without the glitz and glamour and interesting people.

I have 30 years in IT, most of them in Application Development. Your son definately has a future, but due to H1b it will be lower middle class until he pays dues and differentiates his skills and creativity from the Indians. Fortunately, that's not too difficult, but it does take time and diligence and, ideally, a good mentor. I have a hard time finding American java programmers.

I make less today than I did 10 years ago, but I know how to say "bullshit" in Hindi.

Ah, so good news/bad news for him. What explains the lower pay now? Is there less demand or more competition?
My son does do a pretty funny imitation of an Indian in tech support… but I’m thinking that won’t help him.

For lower class white women, marrying a Hispanic may be beneficial for their children. The IQ difference between lower class whites and Hispanics isn’t that great, and is more than offset by the affirmative action benefit their kids will receive from having a Hispanic surname.

I hope your son had the guidance and gumption to live by his wits and thrive anyway.

Again and again I tell friends and former colleagues who fear for the future of their Ed Biz institutions that if their upstairs muckymucks would stiffen their spines and recreate the institution as a truly competitive, ass-kicking/take-no-prisoners meritocracy, parents would be throwing six-figure sums at them with joy and abandon.

The youngsters so educated wouldn't have to worry about finding jobs: they could make their own. (Whether they'd be allowed to run their own companies is an open question, of course. Sooner or later, all have to go face down/ass up on the rug of PC Sharia.)

I have found this to be the most effective HBD red pill of all. I.e., intervening (ha!) in the terror of job loss due to crashing enrollments and interrogating (ha ha ha!) the assumptions behind what is causing the crash.

Of course wasting/destroying/squandering boys' potential is at the root of all this, from a population genetic conflict perspective. Too many men have been content to roll over and numb out...and can't seem to see that there are high IQ white women who could be valuable allies. Instead we get either beta boys or PUAs. Sad. Sadder still when excellence allows others to define it out of some sense of tribalism with a foreign tribe that has slated one's own for destruction. (What other tribes accuse whites of as misdirection.)

Ah, so good news/bad news for him. What explains the lower pay now? Is there less demand or more competition?
My son does do a pretty funny imitation of an Indian in tech support... but I'm thinking that won't help him.

What explains the lower pay now? Is there less demand or more competition?

More competition b/c increased labor supply due to all of the H-1B visa employees.

They tried different tricks to get out if more difficult classes or to get better grades than they deserved.

Such as what?

Trying to get classes to count towards a math degree that were at too low of a level (I.e. College algebra, a fine class to take but math degrees start above that) because they couldn’t pass enough of the upper level electives( I.e. abstract algebra)

One woman succeeded in getting a community college consumer math class to count. Most of thought it was a load of bs that hurt the integrity of our degrees.

I have been told that and its not as unusual as you make it sound. Now, in a position of management, I can even see why this is the case - to the extent that you want employees to be more or less fungible units in a process, you do not want outliers and especially not in function. Its pretty popular in major corporations, at any rate.

In your projects, for example, have you ever used ITIL or Six Sigma methodology? Whether you agree with them or not, they are popular and there's this notion of a functional group, of which an employee is a member of. If a member of your functional group exceeds scope in his purpose, then its like having a cog in the machine that's doing too much. You have to stop it, or some people read it as such, anyway.

I had an old boss who was an expert in that methodology, fairly efficiently converting people into replaceable machines and was chalking up to a quarter million in his last job...and then got replaced by outsourced Polish employees(don't ask me how committee of Eastern European management replaces director, I don't know). Its a bit tragic, though also, amusing.

Dan, Thank you for the reply. In construction a foreman or general foreman often works side by side with his crew. On a job with a lot of paperwork and meetings you still have a sense of what your crew/crews are doing, as you worked in the trade.

Having parents who do not teach and reinforce proper behavior leads to children with behavior problems. Harris's research doesn't get cited when we talk about black kids acting up in class.

Judith Rich Harris's research simply exonerates her own substandard parenting. She became bed-ridden when her bio daughter was 10 and adopted daughter was 6. Harris attributes the adopted daughter being rebellious to peers instead of acknowledging that the girl lost four critical years of mothering that her older sister received.

Tri, thank you for the Cliff Notes answer to Harris’ book. Now I won’t have to wade through it.

I'm familiar with Paul Soros and his fellowship for first and second generation Americans. One year I was surprised to find a Korean Social Justice Warrior. She was raised by Jews but left the family when she was a teen. Being East Asian she had no problem getting herself through Barnard with scholarships and working.

She grew up in a black and Hispanic neighborhood, has worked at an African American think tank, as a paralegal at a civil rights law firm, and as a Spanish translator for (alleged) victims of housing discrimination.

https://www.pdsoros.org/meet-the-fellows/leda-bloomfield

Tri, please tell us that this (((Korean))), SJW who interacts so easily with blacks and other minorities is Gay or Bi or Trans and you have found the fringes’ mother lode.

The obsession with counselors is make work. The need for grief counselors at a school of 800 students when a couple of students die is bizarre. I went to a high school that was slightly more than half the size of Mudd. In my class alone we lost one student each year due to some accident. If you needed to talk to someone you went to your pastor, family, or friends. You didn't go to some stranger who is basically going off of a script.

This just goes to shows what happens when women run the show.

It’s not the counseling but well paid jobs for women that determines the alleged need for counseling.

For lower class white women, marrying a Hispanic may be beneficial for their children. The IQ difference between lower class whites and Hispanics isn't that great, and is more than offset by the affirmative action benefit their kids will receive from having a Hispanic surname.

It’s even beneficial for the White woman. When Mrs Henderson and Mrs Hernandez apply for a good, secure government job who do you think will get the job? Mrs Hernandez of course.

And the kids with a normal White IQ and a Spanish name will just sail through life on affirmative action

Having parents who do not teach and reinforce proper behavior leads to children with behavior problems. Harris's research doesn't get cited when we talk about black kids acting up in class.

Judith Rich Harris's research simply exonerates her own substandard parenting. She became bed-ridden when her bio daughter was 10 and adopted daughter was 6. Harris attributes the adopted daughter being rebellious to peers instead of acknowledging that the girl lost four critical years of mothering that her older sister received.

Having parents who do not teach and reinforce proper behavior leads to children with behavior problems. Harris’s research doesn’t get cited when we talk about black kids acting up in class.

That’s because black mis-behavior is largely genetic … and you simply do not understand the arguments … it is very clear that genes are in control and shared family environment is little more than noise for outcomes.

Poor kids, they don't have the ability to keep up with the intense work load of a serious school like Harvey Mudd. If they had wanted the college experience and the degree, they could have attended a less demanding uni. What they really wanted was the prestige of attending a good school. Sad!

These subjects aren’t easy. You must have the inborn skill to succeed. For example, if Math wasn’t one of your favourite subjects in high school, you do NOT have the skill.

They weren’t teaching Comp Sci back in my day (1960s), but the type of skill is similar.

I am willing to say: if you weren’t an A student in high school Math, don’t bother with engineering or Comp Sci.

Any parent knows that giving in to the demands and tantrums of a small child will get you an unpleasant and hard to control kid in short order that will think nothing of blowing up in any setting to get their way. Obviously large swathes of society have been given the green light to act this way as near-adults and then carry this into college, careers, and our culture at large.

We need a sea change in our culture at the earliest levels if we want to have a prayer of a cohesive and successful society a generation from now.

We have to admit that skills for engineering and other STEM subject are disproportionately male (there will be a few females, but a definite minority).

We also have to admit that there won’t be many blacks or Hispanics. But no shortage of Chinese or Indians (from India).

To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students

When I was in school, working toward a computer science degree, not only were half the students women, most of the guys were shy nerds. There are not too many macho types in the computer science world. How much of a wallflower does a women have to be to not be able to compete with the guys that I went to school with?

If students increasingly grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules, will they be able to code emotionless computers as well as in the past?

I have said it here before, computer programming is a tedious and extremely boring occupation suited to only people with a passion for puzzles. It is for people who would not get bored playing with a Rubik's Cube day after day for years on end.

That’s fits with my experience at university (early 1970s) in Math/Physics.

The men were not aggressive or rude. Some of them were likely on the autism spectrum.

They weren’t bullies, needless to add. They were not remotely threatening to this female.

All the profs were men, but they trended nerdy too. They were all polite to me.

A little late here to the thread, but I read that book. It’s very interesting, and not the crap I would have expected from a psychologist. In fact the author writes a scathing criticism of psychological research somewhere near the beginning that I could have written myself.

There is a problem with her assumption that the “nature” part (1/2?) of children’s development is almost all from their peers, not parents. Even if that’s correct:

a) The parents can have a big influence on who the peers are.
b) Good parents can have an effect of negating a lot more of the crap that kids may get from their peers, and they have 5-6 years to do this. If a kid can really trust the parents, even when he is influenced by his peers, he will still trust the parents advice and guidance over his friends.
Hence, don’t lie to your kid.

I’d like to write a review on this book. I turned it back in to the library.

Everyone at the competition was smarter than me. So I used a trick familiar to most middling intelligent high school students. Get into the mind of the test maker.

Factoring an unknown number of numbers of the form n factorial between n = 2 and n = 1,000,000 on an underpowered computer with only two minutes of CPU time means that it is a trick question. The grad students on the Caltec team might have used a quadratic seive but it is massive overkill. The test makers could not expect the programmers from Cal State Northridge, Cal Poly, or even Santa Barbara City College for heaven’s sake, to have a senior level course in number theory behind them. So I went looking for the trick.

At my public high school we got no number theory, but the kind of student who reads pop math books in the library in grade eight because he’s too short sighted to play baseball after school anymore is bound to come across the 2200 year old Seive of Eratosthenes. It was the fastest solution and quickest to code.

Just possibly a naïve brute force attack where you skip multiples of 2, 3, 5, and 7 would work. On a programmable calculator without room to declare a million element array it could be solved by precomputing a larger table of primes (I am going to try that for fun on an HP 35s). One solution used about four hours of CPU time to calculate all possible answers and they incorporated that output into their program. A minute before the competition ended they submitted a multimillion character program to the compiler. It crashed all our desperate last minute submissions. There was a slow moving wave of laughter as each team told the next team about it. It took hours to clean up the mess and grade the submissions, so we all got to chat. One judge from the ACM told me that he’d gotten sidelined by his interest in computers, so after decades in the field was retiring to a life of amateur astronomy.

To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students

When I was in school, working toward a computer science degree, not only were half the students women, most of the guys were shy nerds. There are not too many macho types in the computer science world. How much of a wallflower does a women have to be to not be able to compete with the guys that I went to school with?

If students increasingly grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules, will they be able to code emotionless computers as well as in the past?

I have said it here before, computer programming is a tedious and extremely boring occupation suited to only people with a passion for puzzles. It is for people who would not get bored playing with a Rubik's Cube day after day for years on end.

It is not tedious, unless you are doing business programming. I’ve frequently been so excited by a program I was developing that I stayed awake until the sun rose. One frequently solves a problem where the answer cannot be looked up in a library or solved within an existing software application.

I have twice as an amateur faced a professional middleweight in the ring. I have driven across the Namibian desert alone, looking for adventure, and I’ve surfed Southern California and the Indian Ocean. But yes, I could barely put Rubik’s Cube down until I had solved it without outside help. It took about 50 hours.

The obsession with counselors is make work. The need for grief counselors at a school of 800 students when a couple of students die is bizarre. I went to a high school that was slightly more than half the size of Mudd. In my class alone we lost one student each year due to some accident. If you needed to talk to someone you went to your pastor, family, or friends. You didn't go to some stranger who is basically going off of a script.

This just goes to shows what happens when women run the show.

This goes to show what happens when men drop the reins and the tools and use their hands instead for stroking various joysticks.

In the early 2000's my son had a 1600 SAT and seven AP 5's and ended up on the Harvey Mudd waiting list. If a girl, he'd have had a scholarship.

I hope your son had the guidance and gumption to live by his wits and thrive anyway.

Again and again I tell friends and former colleagues who fear for the future of their Ed Biz institutions that if their upstairs muckymucks would stiffen their spines and recreate the institution as a truly competitive, ass-kicking/take-no-prisoners meritocracy, parents would be throwing six-figure sums at them with joy and abandon.

The youngsters so educated wouldn’t have to worry about finding jobs: they could make their own. (Whether they’d be allowed to run their own companies is an open question, of course. Sooner or later, all have to go face down/ass up on the rug of PC Sharia.)

I have found this to be the most effective HBD red pill of all. I.e., intervening (ha!) in the terror of job loss due to crashing enrollments and interrogating (ha ha ha!) the assumptions behind what is causing the crash.

Of course wasting/destroying/squandering boys’ potential is at the root of all this, from a population genetic conflict perspective. Too many men have been content to roll over and numb out…and can’t seem to see that there are high IQ white women who could be valuable allies. Instead we get either beta boys or PUAs. Sad. Sadder still when excellence allows others to define it out of some sense of tribalism with a foreign tribe that has slated one’s own for destruction. (What other tribes accuse whites of as misdirection.)

Perhaps "inevitably" is too strong a word to use regarding the deleterious quality of female academic leadership. However, my personal experiences have suggested that females in the highest levels of academic administration do lower the academic quality of colleges and universities. I'm sure there are female academic administrators who've improved the quality of education in their institutions. My observations and experience suggest to me that such are rare.

Doing a study as some have suggested would be almost impossible. To start with there will be disagreement whether it is creating or destroying a "secure and nurturing" environment for today's student snowflakes that constitutes an improvement in a college's or university's academic environment.

I’m sure there are female academic administrators who’ve improved the quality of education in their institutions. My observations and experience suggest to me that such are rare.

Yes, but why are they rare? Because women who really are willing and able are also rare, anyway, far rarer than similar men. Just privileging women to these positions does not work. You cannot make people qualified, talented or competent simply by credentialing or hiring them.

Trying to get classes to count towards a math degree that were at too low of a level (I.e. College algebra, a fine class to take but math degrees start above that) because they couldn't pass enough of the upper level electives( I.e. abstract algebra)

One woman succeeded in getting a community college consumer math class to count. Most of thought it was a load of bs that hurt the integrity of our degrees.

Unfortunately, this allows hucksters like Steve Jobs to take advantage of them.

In what way was Steve Jobs a huckster?

He routinely lied and abused his employees to get them to basically give up their entire lives with little in return (compared to Jobs himself) for it.

The stories of Jobs screwing employees are quite well known – starting with the initial IPO where he wanted to cut out employee #4 from getting any stock, to the creation of the Macintosh, to his screwing the employees of Pixar.

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